Datta Dayadhvam Damyata Shantih Shantih Shantih

Helping The Fat People

I’ve had The Help lingering on my Kindle for a few weeks now, and finally decided to dive into it this morning, as I was growing very tired of the stilted language in Ben Hur. (That’s a post for another time, and one I need to write…about my relationship to General Lew Wallace and the long shadow it has cast over my lifetime.)

In the very first pages of The Help, we meet a loathsome character called Miss Hilly, an embodiment of everything I’ve come to hate about the South since moving here 20 years ago. She’s a well-to-do wife of a man of means (or so it seems thus far) who has too much time on her hands. She uses that time to meddle in the affairs of others, assuming that her social standing gives her leave to interfere. When we first meet Miss Hilly she’s in the throes of trying to pass some fancily-named city ordinance that would insist on Coloured bathrooms in all private homes which employ Negros. (Using the parlance of the time.) Miss Hilly is very convinced that she’s doing the right thing for the health and safety of the community. She is completely unaware of her own bigotry and ignorant of the lack of scientific basis for her claims.

Shutting off the Kindle and diving back into the choppy waters of my real life I see that the fury over the Fat People Suck , er, Obesity Task Force is still going strong over at Aunt B.’s. I’d commented there yesterday, but found myself too lathered up to linger. Today I employed my mad google skills to read up on the well-meaning but cruel people who are behind this sickening waste of grant money.

I found a woman who I’ll call Miss Hilly Two. She’s on this project. She’s also on several other silly projects of similar ilk around town. Save this building, save that pony, etc. She gets noticed, gets her name on letterhead. She’s the exact opposite of me, the Hermitage hermit who wants to be left alone and to leave others alone as well. I think I may know her from a previous job but I’m not 100% sure, because there are no photos of her that I can find. If she is the same woman she was anorexic when I worked for her. So that’s another irony right there.

My problem with all the Miss Hillys of this world is that they are arrogant, assured of their own rightness but deeply hurtful. BUT THEY DON’T CARE WHOSE FEELINGS THEY HURT BECAUSE THOSE PEOPLE DON’T MATTER TO THEM. They have a hierarchy of persons in their mind. If you don’t rate, it doesn’t relate. The South is peopled with Miss Hillys. Of course I should add here that perhaps Indiana has its own Miss Hillys and I just moved away too young to encounter many of them. Regardless, I don’t care to be prejudged by these needlenosed women and their Junior League agendas.

Fat people are fat, and if that could be changed don’t you think we would have done it by now? Creating an underclass of fat people solves nobody’s problems but the Miss Hillys of this world. And it Helps no one.

Writers’ Advice

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."
— William Faulkner